Little Criminals (4 page)

Frankie said, ‘This isn’t just another job. Know what I mean? Kind of money we’re talking about, we don’t get that for standing around looking menacing. I’m just making sure you know what might be involved.’

Brendan thought about that for a moment, then he said, ‘I know what you’re talking about.’

Frankie nodded. Brendan hadn’t gone soft. Give him time to think and he’d make the right decision. A job like this, you need people around that don’t have to be told how the world works. Frankie finally took a sip of his pint.

Three days later, early evening, Frankie Crowe was across the river in Temple Bar, sitting at the counter in Top Nosh, a cup of coffee in front of him. The place wasn’t busy. A couple of stools to Frankie’s left, a fat-faced priest was finishing a sandwich. At the sole window seat, a colour-coordinated couple in their twenties were having a quiet but fierce argument. There were three other people in the coffee shop, all sitting separately. Frankie sipped his coffee and opened the leather-bound notebook that served as organiser, diary and memo pad. Over the two months since the Harte’s Cross mess, he had put together the guts of a promising project. The three Ts – target, timetable, team. Surveillance information, lists of things to do, phone numbers, sources of supplies and support. He leafed through pages that had nothing to do with the snatch, and came to a page on which was written
FC, MP, BS, DF, Mky, TS
.

He had already check-marked his own initials, Martin Paxton’s and Brendan Sweetman’s.

Another – what? – a month, maybe. Even less. No point screwing around. This one works, he told himself, everything changes. This one doesn’t work, everything changes.

‘An organised man.’

Frankie looked at the priest, who was smiling with proud modesty, like he’d just said something that let slip his cleverness. His face was shiny, soft, his accumulated chins quivering. He nodded towards the notebook. ‘An organised man. Everything in its place. A sure sign of an ordered life.’ His voice was Kerry or thereabouts.

If he was cruising he’d have ditched the collar. Just a moocher in need of conversation.

Frankie said, ‘What’s it to you?’ He closed his notebook.

The priest blushed. It took him another couple of minutes to pay his bill, carefully ignoring Frankie, then he gathered his leather shoulder bag and his fold-up umbrella and shuffled off without glancing back. Frankie looked at his watch. Dolly was late. He picked up the
Irish Independent
the priest had left behind. The paper was open to a page on which a politician deplored anti-American tendencies in modern Ireland. Such attitudes, he wrote, lead to a cowardly abdication of international responsibilities. Frankie decided the guy was right.

‘
Fuck off
.’

The female half of the arguing couple was walking fast towards the door. The man sat there, his face red, staring after her. Frankie watched him. It was hard to tell if he was upset about the row, or just embarrassed that it had happened in public. After a moment, the man threw some money on the table and hurried out after the woman.

Frankie moved to their table, beside the window. He watched as a waitress cleared the table and took the money, then he ordered another coffee. From a pocket in the inside back cover of his notebook, Frankie took a folded wad of paper. When it was unfolded, there were three pages clipped from magazines.

The thing about the really rich bastards is that as soon as they clock up enough funds they piss off out of Ireland to live in mansions in the Caribbean. Frankie Crowe had started with a Rich List magazine that came free with a Sunday newspaper. It took him little more than an hour to select five possible targets.

There were a hundred people on the list. He went down through the ones with the hundreds of millions and most of them were tax exiles, only dropping back to Ireland now and then to make a fuss about giving money to charity, or to watch their favourite racehorse win a cup.

He went down through the people with tens of millions, ticking off possibles – some of them did a lot of their business in London and Eastern Europe and spent most of their time there and that was no good. Then it occurred to him that he was going about this the wrong way.

No matter how rich these people are, he told Martin Paxton later, they’re not going to be able to get their hands on more than couple of million in a hurry. ‘So, if you’re taking a million from someone, and you want to do it quickly, it doesn’t matter whether he’s got six million or six hundred million. Matter of fact, the more he has the more difficult it gets. Fortresses some of those bastards live in, you’d need a couple of tanks to get in, and a squad of commandos to bring them out.’

So, he went past the bottom of the Rich List, to where fifty rich people were listed in a section headed ‘Bubbling Under’. There he found his five possibles, all of them said to be worth around thirty million. He asked at his local public library and was directed to the Business Information Centre at the ILAC Library, and there he spent an afternoon looking through press cuttings on business and businessmen. One magazine story was headlined
THE CELTIC TIGERS WHO GOT THE CREAM.
It listed ten up-and-coming entrepreneurs who made fortunes during the boom years, two of whom were also in the ‘Bubbling Under’ rich list. What clinched it was a sentence in another magazine story, about property deals. ‘Justin Kennedy is, of course,’ it said, ‘best known for the breakthrough that came when he landed Bryton, the small private bank.’

‘Couldn’t ask better than that,’ Frankie told Martin. ‘A small private bank – a direct line into the money. Last thing I want is we get into some kind of back-and-forth, me and the family. That’s the way they like to work, the cops. Tie you up in chat, the money just out of reach. Negotiators spinning things out, trick cyclists analysing every fucking word you say, looking for a handle. Fuck that.’ He kept his voice calm and deliberate. ‘Short deadline, let them cough up or pay the consequences. They fuck around, someone else’ll know better next time.’

Now, at the counter in Top Nosh, he again read the page from the Rich List magazine. The piece on Justin Kennedy mentioned his ‘new home on Pemberton Road’, and it carried a picture of the lucky man. Soft-looking fucker with a double chin and bags under his eyes.

What David Finn – known since childhood as Dolly – liked about the narrow cobbled streets of Temple Bar was the smell of the food. Everything else you could stick, particularly the people. He didn’t mind the middle-aged Yank tourists, taking pictures of one another in front of supposedly quaint pubs and streets. Mostly they were polite and kept to themselves. He moved off the pavement to avoid a dozen women unleashing a blizzard of squawking laughs. Their English accents and tight pink T-shirts announced they were a hen party celebrating ‘Ellie’s Weekend in Dublin’. The cobbled streets were full of local posers throwing shapes, people who’d gone to endless trouble with their hair and their clothes to impress passing strangers with their coolness.

When Dolly arrived at Top Nosh he was listening to Billy Frisell on his iPod. Finn was a tall, skinny man, with a long, thin moustache that drooped down each side of his mouth, making his hollow-cheeked face seem even longer than it was. He was in his early forties, with thinning fair hair brushed right back. Under a grey waistcoat, he wore a white collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his bony forearms.

He paused in the doorway to switch off the iPod. He looked around: Frankie’s kind of place, all right. City’s full of them. All chrome and shades of grade. Shitty coffee, rip-off prices, throw a piece of bacon into a bread roll and call it a panini. None of them give a fuck, all waiting for Starbucks to come along and buy out the lease.

Frankie spotted Dolly and waved him to a seat at his table by the window.

When a brusque waitress appeared beside the table, Frankie Crowe ordered a panini. Dolly Finn ordered a chicken salad and a mineral water. In a quiet voice, Frankie started explaining the job, the way he reckoned it would go, the team, the money. Dolly was looking out across the narrow street, his attention caught by a skinny youth sitting on the doorstep of a shop that sold expensive leather clothes. The kid’s head was slack on his shoulders, threatening to pitch forward, as though he was overcome with tiredness. His pale skin was pockmarked, his clothes shabby. He’d been sitting there a couple of minutes when someone from the leather shop, a wispy woman in a leopard-skin top and a long black skirt, came out and told him to move. The kid looked up at her like he couldn’t figure out where the voice was coming from.

‘Fucking junkies,’ Dolly Finn said. ‘They’re everywhere. Used to be a decent town, now look at it.’

The kid made it to his feet and shuffled off down towards the river. Frankie Crowe said, ‘Poor bastard.’

Dolly shook his head. ‘It’s all about self-control.’

The food arrived. Dolly used a fork to poke at his salad, searching through the lettuce until he found a piece of chicken.

Finn was from Cork city. His mother was dead, his father had scarpered to England three decades ago and he didn’t know if his three brothers and one sister were still alive. He joined the army and did two tours with the United Nations in Lebanon. When he’d been out of the army a year, most of it on the dole, a former army associate named Johnner Mulligan offered him a place on a team doing a hold-up at a credit union in Lucan. Since then, occasional projects of that nature financed the purchase and upkeep of his riverside flat and the small shop he owned, around the corner from his flat. The shop opened for a few hours a day, selling jazz albums to a small, dedicated clientele. From among them, he drew on the few others he needed for companionship. Three or four times a year he travelled abroad to attend jazz festivals and concerts. Dolly had no partner, and didn’t see the need. He first had sex in the Lebanon. He didn’t like it. Twice after he came home, he went to prostitutes in Dublin. He hadn’t bothered since. His shop lost money, but it was the centre of Dolly Finn’s life, subsidised by his occasional work with people like Frankie. He had only once been arrested and charged with anything, and the case was dropped before it came to court.

‘When?’ Finn was looking at Frankie, eyebrows raised.

‘Have to spend a bit of time sussing out the guy’s house, take care of a few things.’

Finn nodded. ‘Just so I have a couple of weeks’ notice.’

‘You’re in, then?’

Dolly nodded. A thing like this, if it worked out, would mean he didn’t have to take any more criminal jobs for – depending how it worked out – maybe five or six years. Dolly Finn reckoned he had a simple life, simple needs. The less time he had to hustle to pay for his overheads, the better.

Out on the street, Dolly shook hands with Frankie, inserted the iPod earphones and set off back towards his shop, his stride in sync with the rhythm of Billy Frisell’s ‘Del Close’.

It was just after eight in the evening about two weeks later when Frankie Crowe walked up the stairs of his apartment block in Glasnevin carrying a heavy holdall. As Frankie reached his own landing, the chatty fucker across the hall was on his way out.

‘I hope the music wasn’t too loud last evening?’

Crowe shook his head and walked past. You live in your own house, you don’t have to share space with dickheads who want you to notice their existence. The Glasnevin apartment block in which Crowe had lived since his marriage broke up was awash with bubbly young things from down the country, junior civil servants and college students living independent lives by the grace of Daddy’s chequebook. The kind of people who took it for granted that apartment life is a great shared adventure. Crowe had spent the previous evening in a pub and he hadn’t a notion whether the chatty fucker had been playing music. If it was ever too loud, he wouldn’t have waited for a casual meeting in the hallway to let him know about it.

Inside his flat, Crowe left the holdall on an armchair, made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with his leather-bound notebook. Of the six sets of initials, four were ticked –
FC, MP, BS
and
DF
. Crowe now added a tick to
TS
.

The one unticked entry on the list was
Mky
.

Crowe took out his phone. The kitchen was a corner of the tiny apartment. The living room was another corner. A thin partition wall enclosed the one bedroom, and the miniature bathroom was an enclosed nook within the bedroom. There were neighbours above, below and at three sides, and you could hear every cough and fart.

Frankie Crowe liked the flat. It was as much as he needed. Right now, life was a thin echo of what he’d had with Joan and Sinead. If he couldn’t have that, he’d as soon live in a box that was easy to manage. Some day, when he’d put together a cushion of money and the kind of reputation that comes with pulling off hefty jobs, maybe it would be different. He never allowed himself to indulge the flicker of hope he sometimes felt when he thought of Joan and Sinead, but neither was it an emotion he would allow himself to kill.

Meanwhile, a gaff like this was just the job. If you didn’t have a place for everything and made sure that everything went in its place, you ended up living in a tip. Crowe liked the discipline of it.

‘Yeah?’

‘Milky?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Frankie. How are we fixed?’

‘I’ve had a look around. I can manage it.’